Latoya EAVES, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States
Over four decades, feminist geographies has troubled normative notions of gendered lives, politics, and places. More than that, the field has provided space for thinking through power and agency and has drawn attention to uncomfortable spaces (Eaves 2021). As a result, feminist geographies has provided us with language and methodologies for dislodging hegemonic disciplinary structures of knowledge producers and knowledges. Invigorated by the legacies of feminist geographies, I offer reflections on research in the “uncomfortable spaces” of the United States Southeast, more commonly referred to as “the South”. Drawing on the legacies of Southern born Black women and of Black feminist organizing, this paper produces feminist geographic readings of landscapes, materialities, and embodiments shaping the South. I deliberate on how feminist geographies bolsters our understanding of the spatial logics embedded in the legacies of colonization, displacement, oppression, and anti-Black racism in the region. By doing so, I point to where and how feminist geographies produces a counternarrative that incorporates notions of racial, economic, gender, and sexual justice and that elucidates legacies of liberation work in the South. Finally, I consider how the South conjures possibilities for expanding key ideas in feminist geographies through elucidating the insurgent knowledge production of Black women in the region. This reflection includes a meditation on the relationship between Black feminisms and feminist geographies, suggesting that their intersection provides a conceptual opening for interrogating geographic domination and that influences and undergirds existing spatial arrangements (McKittrick 2006).
Mots clés : Feminist Geographies|Black Feminisms|U.S. South
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